Spike Lee's 'Levees' sequel for HBO covers four hours over two nights

Spike Lee's sequel to his 2006 HBO documentary "When the Levees Broke" plays like a somber street parade through the grimmest front-page headlines of the past five years.

Ted Jackson, The Times-PicayuneSpike Lee addresses the audience gathered for his world premiere screening of "If God is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise" at the Mahalia Jackson Theatre, Tuesday, August 17, 2010.

It launches a week of challenging TV for local viewers, as many networks and local stations mark Hurricane Katrina's fifth anniversary.

In Lee's four-hour "If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise, " airing in two parts Monday (August 23) and Tuesday (August 24) at 8 p.m. on HBO, sequences are dedicated to New Orleans public housing, public schools, health care, formaldehyde-emitting FEMA trailers, crime and investigations into the New Orleans Police Department.

And the postscript to it all, added after the film was first wrapped and filling most of its final hour Tuesday night, is an agonizing sequence about the BP oil catastrophe. Lee and his crew made nine trips back to the region after April 20 to update the story.

There are positive moments in the film, too. Brad Pitt's efforts to restore housing to the Lower 9th Ward is celebrated, as is Texas' welcoming of early New Orleans evacuees. Sequences about the closing of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet and the threat to Louisiana's coastal wetlands condense complicated topics into effective advocacy (conveying the wetlands issue to HBO's upscale audience surely has vast value).

Lee also revisits many of the local people viewers met in "Levees, " and some of their lives have an upward trajectory nearly five years after failed-levee flooding changed them forever.

"That's what we hoped for, " Lee said during an interview a few hours before this past Tuesday night's New Orleans premiere of portions of the film. "But people are struggling."

Not even the thrill of Lee's Super Bowl sequence, which comes at the front end of Monday's episode, leavens the film's overall downcast tone.

Earlier, Lee said the long New Orleans Saints sequence would've been the film's conclusion pre-BP. Last week, he said the piece's position always had been in the film's first hour. Footage of the Glen David Andrews-organized February jazz funeral for the Aints paper bags follows the fourth hour's oil-spill story.

"That's joyous, " Lee said. "We didn't want to end it on BP, because people are still fighting. People are still getting at it day-to-day, so we had to have a somewhat uplifting ending. The Saints was the thing that unified everybody.

"That's what sports does. That's what sports can do. Where you have factions, this and that, sports is one of the few things that people can rally around, especially if you've never won a Super Bowl before, all they've had to go through. The Colts were not winning that game."

Conclusions suggested in the film's treatment of public housing and public education -- both still works in progress, five full years post-K -- surely will divide viewers, as do the issues themselves.

"The fact remains that one of the reasons that people have not returned ... is that where they lived, public housing, was torn down, " Lee said. "Here you are, a citizen of New Orleans, you obey the law, there's a mandatory evacuation. You come back, there's barbed wire around where you live ... lead stuff on the windows, and you're told, well, that's the breaks. It seems to me that had to be on the boards. They just considered how they were going to move people out, and Katrina, the breach of the levees, fell into their lap, and they took advantage of it."

The schools sequence concludes with a clip of Paul Vallas, superintendent of the Recovery School District, losing his temper at a March Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting.

"We knew during 'Levees' that this whole thing is changing every day, " Lee said. "It's not like this is a final document. While we were doing the last hour of BP, stuff was changing every day. In one day, pick up The New York Times, 'Got to change that.' So this thing is very fluid, and I think we gave enough perspective so people can see that this stuff is changing. The verdict is still out on Paul Vallas. I think we gave two legitimate views of the Recovery School District and public education here."

Depending on how viewers interpret the sequence, the Vallas clip could be either a demonstration of his passion for/frustration with the job, or that he's got a very short fuse. Maybe both, actually.

"That's the great thing about art, right?" Lee said. "People might look at it like he's crazy, but down here people wanted to see that from (President Barack) Obama. What Paul Vallas did, people would've loved to see Obama do that (when addressing the oil-spill crisis).

"When your house is on fire, you want somebody to say, 'The house is on fire.' "

. . . . . . . .

Speaking of conflagrations, it probably won't fly with local viewers, but Michael Brown, who someday will be able to give Tony Hayward lessons in self-esteem maintenance, gets a surprising moment of redemption in "Creek, " in an interview shot against St. Louis Cathedral.

Lee said he ran into Brown while having breakfast at a New York hotel.

"It was very cordial, " Lee said. "He said, 'I wish I could've had a chance to defend myself in "Levees.--'' I said, 'We were trying to get in touch with you.' For whatever reason, it didn't happen. I said, 'If we do another one, you're going to be in it.'

"So I'm very happy Michael Brown did that. Even when we did 'Levees, ' I knew that he was a scapegoat. The villain was (Homeland Security chief Michael) Chertoff. Michael Brown was the only one of the Bush administration that agreed to be interviewed.

"Michael Brown was great. It's funny, he was the face of FEMA, but he was not in the decision-making process."

"I think Mayor Ray Nagin is going to go down in history as the worst mayor the city's every had, " says Jacques Morial, identified on screen as co-director of the Louisiana Justice Institute and resident of Treme, but conspicuously not as the brother of Nagin's predecessor, Marc Morial.

"Nagin is known as one of the worst mayors in American history, " says historian-author-professor Douglas Brinkley.

Nagin has defenders in the film, but its overall takeaway on Nagin is -- appropriately, most would say -- harsh.

"He was very honest, " Lee said. "I asked if there was one thing he could take back."

Nagin answered that it was delaying, even by just a few hours, his call for a mandatory evacuation as Katrina approached.

"He didn't say this, but I'm going to jump out on a ledge and say, I bet there's many times late at night where he thinks about how many people, how many lives, could've been saved if he would've called that mandatory evacuation (earlier), " Lee said. "He's going to be thinking about that for the rest of his life.

"It would haunt you. It would haunt anybody to know that your decision affected whether people lived or died."

Nagin was "created as a candidate, a politician, by the descendants of the Confederate gentry, the social and civic elite, " Jacques Morial also says in the film. "They plucked him from obscurity and ran him as the anti-Negro candidate."

As a local cable-TV executive, Nagin was present in promotional appearances on my TV all the time -- discussing Cox Communications' fine programming and reasonable pricing -- before launching his political career, and so was far from obscure.

As for Morial's other claim -- it won't be the most actively discussed scene from "Creek, " at least in local and probably national and maybe international political circles.